Aide tried to stop Trump praising Hitler – by telling him Mussolini was ‘great guy’

Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.

“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marines general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.

“I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”

Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss.

Sciutto is a CNN anchor and national security analyst. His new book, The Return of Great Powers, will be published on Tuesday. CNN published a preview on Monday.

Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.

“But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”

Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before.

But Sciutto’s recounting of his conversation with Kelly comes amid resurgent fears over Trump’s authoritarian leanings, with Trump the presumptive Republican